I was recently looking at some Metabase statistics and noticed that it now contains over 6.3 million reports since going live. That means that over half of all reports were submitted by web instead of email. It also means that CPAN Testers has nearly doubled in a year.

The year has not been without hiccups, as the recent Amazon-related outage showed. I'll be spending some time this summer addressing some deficiencies and will be encouraging people to get involved in improving the CPAN Testers clients to make it easier for more people to participate.

That's a good point. It's a function of uploads and the ratio of reports per upload. f you look in my Free QA talk from OSCON 2010, I give some of those stats over time. See p.37 for a graph. In 2008 there were about 50 reports per upload; in 2010 there were 200+ reports per upload. Barbie's comment below suggests that ratio keeps increasing, meaning more testers and/or more reports per tester.

Taking the number of dist/versions published on CPAN/BACKPAN (25855) and assuming 12million reports, that means we have approximately 464.12 reports per dist/version.

On the face of it, there is a lot of duplication, however, we don't currently record all the platform information and the environment. So although you might see many reports for Linux, they will be for different distros/versions and possible different installed libraries/versions. One of my hopes for the new smoke client is to provide more of that sort of metadata so we can show just how diverse the testing really is.